


Double Exposure

by Violetwilson



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Jealous Kylo Ren, Oral, Post TLJ, im a slut for mega-class star dreadnoughts, just so much stuff about ships, rey is really good at her job, sex dreams but it's real because of The Force, they have to stop meeting like this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 05:08:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13780359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violetwilson/pseuds/Violetwilson
Summary: Find the secret lab in the wreck of the Supremacy. Destroy anything she cannot steal. Simple enough orders, even if she has to make it through the new Supreme Leader to do it. Astronavigation is impossible in a world made of blurred lines, but that doesn’t matter. The Supremacy will never move again. Rey is going to make sure of it.-She doesn’t feel things in the right order anymore. His feelings, hers, they all blend together in a mash of noise and sound that is, frankly, distracting. She moves dream-like through a world that bleeds over at the edges. Things like his hands on her thighs. Like his mouth on her neck.





	Double Exposure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [something_pithy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/something_pithy/gifts).



> Something_pithy gave me such a terrific prompt for the RFFA Valentine's Exchange 2018. I really enjoyed getting to drag out my dusty EU 'verse knowledge, and this story attempts to stay within the bonds of canon. Though I do take some liberties.
> 
> Big ups to Jason Fry and Kemp Remillard's "Incredible Cross-Sections" for the schematics of the Supremacy's layout. Other sources for info linked at the bottom.

She doesn’t feel things in the right order anymore. His feelings, hers, they blend together in a mash of noise and sound that is, frankly, distracting. She moves dream-like through a world that lets things bleed over at the edges. Things like his hands on her thighs. Like his mouth on her neck.

She feels phantom brushes of sensation, pain, and above all a deep, heartsick longing that sometimes chokes her while she speaks and sometimes wakes her from sleep with a quick, stifled cry.

One day she hits her head on the underside of the _Falcon’s_ anterior vents, and she feels _him_ feel it instead, like he’s a black hole that has absorbed her pain. All she feels is the echo of that impact while, distantly, he grits his teeth and his head throbs.

Sometimes she has _his_ dreams. A double vision falls across the landscape of her life, clear and solid but somehow transparent. Kylo Ren dreams about chaos and fire mostly, and in those dreams she is a bystander and he is a victim. But on the nights when he dreams about her, he looks right at her, and it’s the real, actual Rey who he touches, curses, fights.

And sometimes, when she is tired or weak she will call him to her dreams, and he will go eagerly. Like he’s waiting. She has no idea what time system he lives on, just that when she falls into unconsciousness and calls for him, he never denies her.

It happens so much that she crawls into Finn’s bed sometimes to try and synch her breathing up with someone else. Just to feel like she isn’t slowly blending into Ben Solo, or whoever he actually is inside. But she has to stop that after a while, because it’s too confusing to feel Ben roaring in her head while she’s nestled safe against Finn. It’s too bewildering to wake up to the feeling of him gritting his teeth or just staring at her from across a distance of incalculable space, his eyes fathomless and hurt.

“You left me,” he says into her head.

“I had to,” she says out loud.

“I wouldn’t want you to wake up _Finn_ ,” he says, unyielding as his fingers grip his gloves hard enough to make the fabric stretch.

“Get out of my head,” she snarls. And she _makes_ him. And for one second she feels past the anger and the jealousy to the fleeting flash of pleasure that flicks in his eyes. Like he’s _proud_ of what he sees.

Or maybe he sees other things, because when she meets him again on the wreckage of the _Supremacy_ , he is waiting for her like he’d stolen the plan right out of her mind. Like she’d given it to him. And maybe she did. It’s getting harder and harder to tell.

X

Here is how they meet again:

A resistance-friendly slicer gives Rey two minutes of scanner-cover to fly an A-wing through the wreckage of the _Supremacy_ , crowded by cargo vessels and vulture droids ripping the ruins to shreds in deep space. A skeleton crew of staff work behind re-sealed atmospheric barriers to disembowel their floating capital piece by piece.

She all but crashes her A-wing into what had, at one point, been the _Supremacy’s_ starboard fusion reactor complex. Now it is a shattered hulk of shredded durasteel embedded in the destroyer’s superstructure. It was ripped in half by the sudden arrival of a ship making lines straight through 60,000 meters of Kuat-Entrallaian engineering. The _Supremacy’s_ two million or so residents were fortunate, really, that the _Raddus_ had missed the actual reactant silo.

Instant death is still death, for all that it’s quicker.

Slipping down the hallways undetected is something of a trick. The dismembered starboard wing has been permanently severed from any hope of even auxiliary engine power, so she knows there must be a generator frigate wired to the shattered system for the emergency lights to be emitting even low-power light.

The occasional discrete instruction from Finn on her comlink, a quick note to Poe on the exact coordinates of the idling dreadnaught, and a handful of disoriented ‘troopers later and she arrives, breathless and right at the very edge of her destination.

The research facility.

The mission is to find this lab and document whatever is in it, and, more to the point, to destroy whatever she can’t steal. She has three slicer cards in her pocket: one for door access, one to extract info, and one to wipe whole system. Ideally, she’ll only need the first two. Rey stands with the first card stuck inelegantly in the locking interface panel, Finn’s voice in her ear.

“In and out, just place the charges and take what you can. You have your datacards?”

Rey watches her slicer card dump a four-stage virus into the ship’s weakened security system. The card had been DJ’s tech, Rose had said, a dark look in her eyes. She said this would be almost like justice.

To Rey, what it feels like is life on Jakku.

“I’ve got it,” Rey says, her breath coming hard even though all she’s doing is waiting around. Rey has heard stories of Palpatine’s storeroom at Mount Tantiss, of Joruus C'baoth, and Admiral Thrawn. She’s imagining Spaarti cloning cylinders or Sith holocrons or… something.

But when the door slides open, what she sees is a long room filled with rows and rows of transparisteel cases and abandoned work benches lit only by emergency illumi-strips on the ceiling. Where the light falters, there is a red lightsaber humming in the corner, illuminating the rest of the void.

Had she known he’d be here all along? Had she seen it for herself?

He smiles, maskless and ravenous. “Isn’t that why you volunteered for this mission?”

She goes for his _throat._

X

She used to be sure that this, what they’re doing, is fighting. Fighting used to be about weaponry, about bodies. Now fighting is about power, about tapping into an ebb and flow that is as huge as the whole universe and screaming against the closed door of his mind.

She slashes, parries, strikes, but all she knows for sure is that it didn’t have to happen like this.

She knows this the way that she knows that the _Supremacy’s_ on-ship tracking control complex has the data processing power of an entire planetary intel hub. That it links huge computer arrays to remote databanks that produce astrogation charts, flight data, and interplanetary trajectory calculations at unheard of speeds.

She knows, too, that when Amilyn Holdo accelerated the _Raddus_ from zero to the speed of light, her trajectory took her on an intercept course that narrowly, _narrowly_ missed the research facility deep inside the _Supremacy’s_ portside wing. All she did was orphan it. One body split into two.

All this, though, is not relevant. Not when she’s standing in front of him, dressed in a stolen First Order flight suit and gripping her saber so hard she feels the handle indenting lines on her skin. There’s a break in the fighting, and he tilts his head up with his eyes narrowed.

“It’s better in real life,” he says, his breath heaving, his eyes glassy and feverish. “This. Us.”

If she says even one thing, it will be to agree with him. So she doesn’t say anything.

One heartbeat, two, and then they’re fighting again. They both have sabers out, and she’s pressing him back into the great metal carcass of the _Supremacy_ , blade to blade and nearly skin to skin. But it feels better. It does.

There is before and there is now, and _now_ is pressing Kylo Ren against a durasteel girder whose structural integrity has been fundamentally, irrevocably damaged. And then he pushes back and they are after each other all over again.

The fight is a blur. Poe’s in the atmosphere, her comlink is dead weight in her pocket, and three systems away, Leia Organa waits in a cloaked silencer-class frigate for Rey and Kylo Ren to finishing tearing holes in each other.

This has all happened before. It will happen again.

Now he slams _her_ into a wall, the grip of their sabers biting into each other. In holos, lightsabers look light as air. But to fight with one is to be constantly directing a living beam of energy, and that energy takes strength.

Strength she has. So does he. Strength to reestablish that they are two bodies and not one, strength to shatter transparisteel canisters and drive blades through the walls with the kind of savagery and anger that burns hot and fast. But not long.

They stagger apart, winded and furious and suddenly remembering, both of them, the last time they’d seen each other. The memory slides into place, a mutual experience that overlays on top of the sparkling shards on the ground and the pain from the gash on her shoulder and the burn on his side.

It is the one where he slipped into _her_ dream, and she hadn’t wanted to question it because in this one, for the first time, he’d been running his hands through her hair and whispering to her as she sat with her head tilted up to his.

“We’re the same,” he murmured, standing right in front of her and as clear as that future of his that she’d seen. The one that had died. “We’re the same.”

That dream had been hazy, dark and faintly pink at the edges. There was a black floor under the raised marble seat under her, but beyond that only darkness.

Rey’s dreams are always about the desert, and in those ones she leaves him to the elements. In those dreams she kills him. This was not one of those dreams.

She’d reached out to touch him, running a hand right through his hair to the scar on his temple. And he’d turned his face and caught her wrist and pressed a kiss into the skin of her palm, almost biting her as his breath fanned hot against her skin.

And her heart bent herself in knots for him, just for that. Just for that sweetness. She watched him press greedy kisses up her forearm, the soft skin there covering up her blue veins. He kissed her right up to her shoulder, drawing her closer, pressing his mouth against the dip of her collar bone, hunting for the base of her neck as her heels kicked into the solid base of the chair to get just a little closer.

And she leaned into him as his hands moved heavily, desperately for her waist. Her hands twitched at her side, dreamlike for all their opacity and strength. His words were fast and almost tripping over themselves.

“I can give you what you want,” he’d promised her, rough and throaty as his fingers pulled her to the edge of the chair, parting her legs so he was standing between them and pressing himself into her. Her hands went to his chest and climbed to his neck. To the pulse she knew was beating there.

He let out a groan when she pressed her fingers in, and she tilted her head back, because if they were going to do this, then she was going to make him pay for it.

“You tried to kill me,” Rey murmured, and his hands stopped their reverential running down her sides for an instant. He was all energy, all desperate hunger. No monster, no predator, but a man on the very edge of an edge.

She could push him.

“I didn’t know you were in the Falcon,” he said raggedly, and when his hands went to her hips they flexed there, starting and stopping like an engine that wouldn’t turn over. She widened her thighs, making room for him right at the meridian of her body. He moved in to fill the void, the length of him pressed against her, and _Ri’ia_ -

_What had she said? What had she said to him?_

She'd said, “I don’t believe you.”

He had pressed his mouth against her neck. “Then I’ll show you.” And he’d sucked the skin there into his mouth. “I’ll _show_ you.”

A moment. She had nodded. Gods forgive her, she had.

And, oh. _Oh._ He slipped her sleeping shirt off her shoulders to pool around her hips, and she’d reached forward for him, yanking on the soft fabric of his tunic. He pushed it up over his head for her, and he’d been bare before her.

And-                                                  

And in the defunct First Order lab, bathed in dim light, Kylo Ren lets out a jagged cry and pounds a fist against the wound on his leg. They snap out of it so hard that something stretches between them and snaps, and Rey is suddenly feeling the pain of _his_ burn. She wasn’t expecting it. She’d been caught off guard by the memory, and she staggers to one side with her hand pressed over his wound on _her_ body _._ Pain transfer is so unfair.

“Don’t,” she says raggedly, almost crying at the pain after that memory. She extends a hand for him with the other still clutching her phantom injury. “You have to stop doing that.”

He takes a step toward her and she staggers back, full of secondhand feelings from a dream that was not really a dream and a wound that she had given someone to someone else, damn it.

She reaches for her blade and faces him, and though they’re only a few feet apart from each other it could be miles. It could be inches.

“Fighting each other is a _waste_ ,” he says, his voice loud over the drum of the generators struggling to maintain power to the amputated wing. There’s a stillness about him that she doesn’t recognize from dreams or from the man on Crait, and she wonders what in him had to die for that calm to spring up in his eyes.

His wound hurts her as he walks forward.

She doesn’t drop her lightsaber but she backs up, one hand behind her to feel for the casing. She’s going for the wall, for the data bank she knows is there. With a little luck, and maybe with another one of those dreams knocking them both out, maybe she can get her slicer into the port-

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

Kylo Ren puts a hand on the wound in his side. Draws in a deep breath. And she can’t see what he does, but she _feels_ it. The wound closes, stitching itself up as he opens his body to the everlasting Force. When the pain abates, he drops his hand.

His voice is ragged, like the effort has cost him. “I never got to show you this part. More than just destroying. And death. We could build, Rey-”

And he stops, because there’s a memory overlaying the present again. One second she’s on the _Supremacy_ waiting for him to just _say_ it, and then the next she’s sitting on an obsidian chair with his head between her thighs and her hands in his hair and-

Kylo walks right through the Ben Solo drawing Rey to a shuddering, panting orgasm. Both things have happened, are happening.

“I think I’m going insane,” she breathes, noticing for the first time that the chair she’d been gripping with white knuckles, the one he’d pushed her back into through the force of his tongue on her clit, is a throne.

Her back touches the wall. Kylo advances.

“I don’t want to destroy you,” he says, calm as a dead star.

“Just everything else?” Rey says. Her fingers are in her back pocket, her hands reaching for the data card. There isn’t time for an extraction. Third chip it is, then.

“Not that either.”

He comes to a stop, his hands loose at his sides and his saber clipped to his belt.

The slicer chip isn’t picky. It needs to be inserted into something with a current, which is considerably easier than finding a data bank. Destroying something requires less finesse than building it, all things considered. She doesn’t consider it. She doesn’t even breathe.

“Come back with me, Ben,” she says.

He smiles.

“You going to tell me you won’t ask me a third time?” he says, his head tilting fractionally to one side.

“No.” She clicks the chip into an outlet just as she flicks her lightsaber into life, green to his red. Luke’s lightsaber. “But I’ll repeat the order if you like.”

Rey’s comlink beeps at her hip and Finn’s voice cuts through the chatter. “Bombers ran into a clutch of TIEs and we’re _just_ out of range. Time to go! Poe’s waiting for you, get out of there!”

His eyes snap to her face, his voice acid. “Seems you failed your mission.”

Rey remembers the way that orgasm had hit her. It had felt like an explosion that started in her toes and traveled to her up her body, and then out, and then beyond. She remembers the way she’d felt his mouth press one last kiss into her thigh as she slipped into wakefulness, still wet and panting. She lets that feeling, that warm feeling of comfort and belonging and satisfaction push out every thought in her head.

And he feels it (he has to feel it). His hand comes to her cheek.

“I wouldn’t say I failed,” Rey whispers. “You could still join me.”

His eyes find her and his lips part as he _breaks_. He comes undone in front of her. His hands go around her waist and his mouth is hunting hers and she reaches up to catch it right as _system_obliterate_ takes effect.

There’s a beep.

His head snaps up.

How was she supposed to know the First Order was researching electrosensitive explosives?

X

The far end of the lab, the one near the door, is the part that detonates first. Transparisteel shards go flying through the air and she has one heartbeat of reaction time to throw her hand out behind his back to stop it from ripping them both to shreds. Then the heat comes. Then the _metal._

And at this point Ben turns around too, standing right in front of her so she can’t kriffing _see_ and holding back the explosion with one hand and an annoyed look on his face. An alarm rings and is promptly obliterated, either by Kylo or the electrical fire that is kicking cheerfully to life in front of the room’s only door.

The second set of charges goes next. These ones are bigger than the last, and both she and Ben strain into it now, focusing everything they have into containing what has to be enough explosives to take out an entire planetary defense ring with nothing more than, what, three sets of coin-sized sized disks connected to a central computer?

When the third bank goes, they almost can’t contain the ball of fire and energy. The heat bucks against their hands, a swell of energy trapped in a balloon of Force energy that bulges and expands, pressing them both back. The air outside the inferno is absolutely silent, the noise swallowed up by the great void they’re trying to stifle in the center of the room. The negative pressure sends a strong wind driving into the blaze, tugging at Rey’s hair and his cloak. Anything loose goes straining for the blaze.

The air is getting thinner and thinner as the fire burns it off. Whatever emergency protocol was designed to contain this has been destroyed by the crash, apparently. They can’t stop this on their own.

“ _Exhale_ ,” Rey screams, every muscle in her body straining.

“What?” he roars.

Under her feet, the damaged superstructure of the portside wing of the _Supremacy_ starts to buckle. It bends. It breaks.

The good news is that the sudden vacuum of space kills the fire and dissipates the raging ball of energy into the catatonic blackness of space.

The bad news is that they are hurled into space with the force of a pressurized system suddenly, explosively regaining equilibrium. She is conscious of his hand gripping hers and the strongest wind she’s ever felt, and then she is outside the ship, floating in a vacuum with no EV suit.

Later, much later, people will tell her how it happened.

How she'd almost hit into Poe’s idling freighter, and even though Threepio will point out that the odds weren’t really _so_ staggering, given the tracking beacon that had drawn Poe’s ship to within a meters of Rey’s crashed A-wing, it won’t matter. All anyone will say is how Rey was in the atmosphere for less than a minute before the great maw of Poe’s ship had swallowed her up into a pressurized room again. And how it had nearly killed her. And what are the odds.

He’s a crack pilot. She’s a Jedi.

Doctor Colonia will explain the mechanics. Air pressure. Oxygen density.

Chewbacca will tell her about the freezing point of blood.

Leia won’t say anything, but she’ll take Rey’s hand in hers and nod when Rey says that space is a lot colder than she thought it would be.

But here, right now, Rey is waking up on the floor of Poe’s disguised cargo ship. Poe is leaning over her with a panicked look on his face as he performs completely unnecessary chest compressions. Her head rings. She’s so _cold._

 _Rey, Rey,_ Ben is saying in her head.

 _Was that real?_ She wonders. It might be out loud. _Did you see that too?_

The sound of Ben rolling onto his stomach next to her is the only answer she really needs.

Poe is rubbing her down, trying to help the frostbite she can feel on her extremities, and she realizes that she’s _shaking_ , and her is skin a bright brown-red color.

“He was holding onto you,” Poe says as Rey looks over at Ben. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. He had his arms around you, I couldn't get you without bringing him.”

Rey lets her head go slack on the floor of the ship, her eyes closing. She exhales. 

“No, I understand,” she rasps. “I really do.”

There was before, and there is now.

Ben Solo draws in a deep breath as Rey closes her eyes and considers the third dimension.

Tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> I confess that I was a backup writer for this story, so I didn't have a ton of time to write this. But I tried real hard and I LOVED YOUR PROMPT SO THANK YOU.  
> Reviews and kudos very sincerely appreciated! And [my Tumblr](https://violetwilson.tumblr.com/) is home to many star wars memes and things!  
> Links!  
> [The Supremacy](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Supremacy)  
> [Being in space without a suit](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/08/can_you_survive_in_space_without_a_spacesuit.html)  
> [Spaarti cloning cylinders](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Spaarti_cloning_cylinder)  
> [Mount Tantiss](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mount_Tantiss)  
> [Joruus C'baoth](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Joruus_C%27baoth)  
> [Grand Admiral Thrawn](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mitth%27raw%27nuruodo/Legends)


End file.
